End of Days - Prologue

Sunset Valley – The End of Days
Prologue

Sunset Valley, BC

River’s Journal – June 15th 1989

Today is one of the sunniest days we’ve had. Spring in British Columbia has always been a mixture of precipitation and rain. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but for right now, everything is right with the world – everything is as it should be. I’m now a young adult. Haruo turned young adult a year ago. And now the two of us are of the age of majority. Bebe turned young adult about six months ago and our lives are ahead of us. The three of us and Phil, Haruo’s friend, have always been tight, inseparable. Although Bebe tolerates Phil and Phil does everything to get on Bebe’s nerves, they’re still friends. And now Clarissa has entered the scene. She has been a boon for Phil as she tolerates his idiosyncracies. I think they’re a match.

Meanwhile, Haruo, having been henpecked by his mother, has never really known what to do. Just recently, Haruo and I have decided to move to 5 Summerhill Court and that took a lot of convincing on my part, but I think he needed to be away from his mother – with some of the things he’s had to go through, I fear for his sanity. I don’t know how we managed to do it, but we have enough saved that we can put tents on a large sized property and start living our lives there as we earn enough money to make a success of ourselves.

But even so, we’ve heard so many disturbing things on the news. The Soviets have had yet another regime change. Since 1982 and the death of Brezhnev, we’ve had a string of Russian General Secretaries. Andropov lasted two years, then Konstantin Chernenko, now we have Mikhail Gorbachev who had led the Soviet Union to a point where there was a tenuous peace between the United States and the Warsaw Pact nations that were allied with the Soviet Union. Evidently according to my social studies teacher, who not only has been teaching us history, but also keeping us abreast of current news – we discussed many world events in class; the Soviet Union’s Politburo has been disgruntled over the fact that Gorbachev is making overtures to the West and it was nearing a tipping point. There was talk of a coup so the peace was very fragile and hung in a balance where the slightest event could tip it in a direction that was unwanted.

According to Haruo who also watched the news lately, he was of the opinion that the Soviets would probably topple Gorbachev and send us into a war that would quite possibly end humanity. I wish I could say that he was wrong. But growing up with his mother has left him with a severe case of complex PTSD and an outlook that is always pessimistic. He says that is the only way that he can protect himself. I wish there was something that I could do to help him.

Sometimes I feel as though world events sweep us a long in a tidal wave and we are helpless to stop it. I doubt that we as ordinary people can. World events are influenced by a few people in power whose motives we don’t understand and the rest of us are caught up in the ramifications of the decisions of the few. But since we have little influence over the things that bother the rest of the world, the only thing that we can do is to go about our daily lives and hope that the responsibility that we’ve given our world leaders is not for naught.

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When I was in the White House, I was confronted with the challenge of the Cold War. Both the Soviet Union and I had 30,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy the entire earth and I had to maintain the peace. ~ Jimmy Carter

I remember fear and I remember the potential of nuclear war. ~ Jack Scalia